Article review methodology and practice

¶ … Icons and Early Modern Portraits" adds a fascinating new twist to the investigation of the material culture of the Renaissance, which may be brought to bear directly on the study of Renaissance art. Nagel is concerned here with a question of artistic influence, which he sees being transmitted through a lively trade in Greek and other eastern religious icons. To a certain extent, this fact is self-evident but Nagel persuasively argues for several reasons that it has been underemphasized in discussion of the subject.

Nagel first notes that contemporary Renaissance viewers of these icons made several erroneous assumptions about them, which may have obscured the inability of contemporary art scholars today to view these pieces through the eyes of the Renaissance, as it were. Nagel notes from papers related to acquisition and provenance dating from the early modern period that the antiquity of these objects was greatly exaggerated, and on many occasions we can see direct Renaissance textual evidence to indicate that the icons were thought to contain actual eyewitness representations of the saints and sages depicted upon the icons. Nagel also traces broader issues of visual influence: he analyzes the frequency of depiction of portrait subjects in the Renaissance and discovers that, while sculpture had numerous ways to depict a portrait bust (whether in bas relief on coinage or life-size and in marble), the only reliable visual depiction of the human figure in bust format in painting had come from icons and provided a sort of model as painters discovered ways of using that template with the advanced Renaissance techniques of perspective and color. Classical portrait busts were structured as objects in themselves, with rounded bottoms that completed the object in three-dimensional space -- whereas the Byzantine and Greek icons were usually cut cleanly at the bottom of the image, glimpsing it as though through a window.

Nagel then follows this more general work of historiography by demonstrating the value of his approach in analyzing two Renaissance works which clearly relate to his subject. The first is Botticelli's Portrait of a young man holding a medallion, from around 1485. Here the artist has deliberately inserted a representation of an icon held by the subject of the paitning. The disjunction in visual style between nthe two is great: Nagel claims that it is included as "an image that speaks the language of antiquity." Within Botticelli's own depiction it is possible to see how the physical icon had been altered and shaped by Renaissance owners. Nagel seems accurate that Botticelli is showing the way in which Renaissance portraiture is itself a restaging of earlier modes of devotional picture-making -- he includes the depiction of the icon itself within a type of painting, the chest-length portrait bust cut off cleanly at the bottom, which itself has derived from icons in the first place. But Nagel makes a larger and more contentious suggestion, in linking the icon of Saint Luke located at Santa Maria Maggiore with not only Leonardo's written comments about the icon -- Nagel notes that Leonardo elsewhere tells a story about an "erotically wayward religious icon," a devotional image purchased solely for its comeliness by a sexually-motivated connoisseur -- but with Leonardo's own Mona Lisa. Nagel suggests that the reason for thie elevation of this "fairly standard portrait commission" from 1503 into a canonical masterpiece has something to do with Leonardo's central aesthetic concerns in the work, which rely on making the familiarity of icon portraiture into something overall more solid and realistic. I am inclined to agree with this hint towards a new interpretation of the Gioconda and Leonardo in general -- Nagel's belief that it represents a secularization of earlier iconographic portraits of the Virgin Mary seems entirely plausible, purely on the basic visual analysis.